Sweden’s DIY Drone Killer "Loke" is Perfect for Ukraine

How Saab Built ‘Loke’ in 84 Days with Pallets, Bungee Cords, and Brains

Mar 28, 2025

Each new innovation coming out of Sweden is quickly bringing me to the conclusion that Saab might just be the most advanced defense contractor on the planet right now.

If you’ve ever zip-tied a GoPro to a drone and called it “tactical innovation,” you may appreciate what Saab just pulled off.

In a blistering 84 days—yes, less than the runtime of a Marvel franchise feud—Swedish defense contractor Saab, in coordination with the Swedish Air Force and FMV (Defense Materiel Administration), built and tested a mobile counter-UAS system using little more than off-the-shelf components, extension cords, and sheer Scandinavian audacity.

Welcome to Loke, a Frankenstein’s monster of modern warfare that looks like it was assembled in a garage but hits with the precision of a Swiss watch.

The Origin Story: Not So Much Designed as Improvised

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Loke wasn’t built to be pretty. There was no elegant design phase, no expensive product lifecycle roadmap. Saab’s engineers were given a challenge—make a fully functional, mobile C-UAS system using existing tech—and they sprinted like their funding depended on it (because it probably did).

The Loke project didn’t start with a glossy PowerPoint presentation or a year-long feasibility study. There were no meticulously color-coded Gantt charts or billion-euro R&D budgets. What it did start with was a challenge—posed bluntly and unceremoniously by Sweden’s top brass: How fast can we field a working counter-drone system using what we already have?

Saab’s answer? Give us 84 days. And a forklift.

From the outset, the mission wasn’t to engineer a next-gen weapon from scratch but to MacGyver a working prototype from commercial and military gear that was already sitting on shelves. If this sounds like defense innovation by way of IKEA, that’s because it kind of was. The approach was modular, pragmatic, and unapologetically utilitarian—less Lockheed Skunk Works and more “tactical Home Depot.”

And it worked.

Rather than funneling millions into custom components or perfecting ruggedized housing, Saab and its military partners took an off-the-shelf radar, a naval-grade gun platform, a few nondescript antenna systems and cobbled together a fully integrated kill chain in under three months.

At one point, someone literally strapped a 150-kg radar to a wooden pallet with bungee cords. And no, that wasn’t a placeholder—they ran live tests that way.

This wasn’t just improvisation; it was an intentional stress test of Sweden’s defense-industrial agility.

Could a Tier-1 defense firm like Saab deliver operational capability faster than bureaucracy could say “procurement cycle”? Could engineers, airmen, and war planners ditch the luxury of time and still produce something battlefield-ready?

Apparently, yes.

The result is Loke—a name borrowed from Norse mythology’s god of mischief, which feels oddly appropriate for a system that essentially punked the traditional military acquisition process.

Fun fact: This is also my dog’s name; he’s a Siberian Husky named Loke.

What’s more, this fast-and-loose approach wasn’t chaotic—it was structured improvisation. Saab leaned heavily on a design principle usually reserved for Silicon Valley startups: minimum viable product.

Every component had to earn its place. Every wire, radar, and round of ammunition had to contribute directly to one thing—neutralizing hostile drones at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional solutions.

While some nations are still debating drone taxonomy in committee meetings, Sweden just built a working prototype, tested it, scored dozens of kills on live targets, and is already planning battlefield deployment by 2025.

It's not that the system cuts corners—it just doesn't wait around for the corners to be installed. Loke’s origin isn’t just a case study in speed. It’s a warning shot across the bow of every bloated, risk-averse procurement office from Washington to Brussels: Adapt or fall behind.

Sensor Suite: Giraffe on a Pallet, Cables in the Wind

For drone detection, Loke employs the Giraffe 1X radar, a 150-kilogram radar system with an instrumented range of 75 kilometers—but a more practical detection range of about 4 km for the tiny quadcopters cluttering modern battlefields. The radar was literally ratchet-strapped to a pallet.

Power? Delivered via an orange extension cord snaking across a military-grade generator like it was borrowed from someone’s garage.

Oddly enough, I just wrote about Ireland donating Giraffe Mk4 radar systems to Ukraine here on March 9.

Next to the radar: an unpainted red container bristling with mystery antennas. Saab has stayed silent on what’s inside, but logic suggests it's doing some mix of electronic reconnaissance, jamming, or secure comms. And no, they didn’t even bother painting it.

Time was of the essence, and aesthetics didn’t make the kill chain.

Despite the makeshift look, the system logged 36 quadcopters and 17 fixed-wing UAVs eliminated during trials. Not bad for something that looks like it was assembled in a backyard during a blackout.

Weapons Truck: Naval Guns Go Off-Road

Once a drone is spotted, Loke’s engagement vehicle steps in with the Trackfire remote weapon station—gear typically reserved for the Swedish Navy’s Combat Boat 90. Saab didn’t redesign the gun platform. They just dropped it on a truck and let it rip.

Trackfire comes armed with a 7.62mm FN MAG, a 12.7mm M2 Browning, digital fire control, day/night vision, laser rangefinder, and automatic target tracking that doesn’t blink.

This setup doesn’t try to down $1,000 drones with million-dollar missiles. That’s the point. Loke is economically sane—machine guns for cheap drones, not AMRAAMs. It’s a big win in the cost-per-kill arms race.

Loke isn’t just a new toy for Sweden’s military. It’s a paradigm shift in how defense systems are built—quickly, collaboratively, and with a deep disregard for bureaucratic drag. This isn’t a system that ticks every NATO compliance box. Then again, Sweden only officially joined NATO on March 7, 2024. They're not bound by the same doctrinal inertia yet.

Saab, to its credit, seems to have taken full advantage of that gray zone, prioritizing speed and flexibility over regulation and aesthetics.

As Carl-Johan Bergholm, Saab’s SVP of Surveillance, put it, “This wasn’t a typical product development cycle spanning several years. By cleverly repurposing existing products and integrating new features and technologies, we brought the concept together at record speed.”

Translation: “We duct-taped our way to operational capability—and it works.”

In the US, counter-UAS development has followed the usual script: identify a problem, throw 10 contractors and 10 years at it, and then field a 30,000-pound truck that jams Wi-Fi and sometimes explodes things.

Systems like M-LIDS are powerful, no doubt—they combine radar, optics, electronic warfare, and even kinetic guns. But they’re also pricey, complex to operate, and harder to scale in large numbers.

Dronebuster, on the other hand, represents the opposite end of the spectrum—a man-portable rifle that jams drone signals. It’s cheap, effective at short range, and used widely by special operations. But it’s a one-trick pony, relying on operator line-of-sight and offering no detection, tracking, or kinetic kill options.

Loke sits somewhere in the sweet spot.

It’s more than a jamming rifle but far more agile and cost-effective than a full M-LIDS system. Saab’s team essentially said: What if we didn’t need to reinvent everything? What if we just bolted proven gear together, slapped it on a mobile platform, and focused on operational readiness instead of developmental perfection?

And here’s the kicker—Sweden did in 84 days what took the US years. Loke doesn’t have lasers or drone swarms or AI kill chains (yet), but it gets the job done. And in this new era of drone warfare, that’s the name of the game: kill it fast, kill it cheap, and keep moving.

The Drone Threat Isn’t Slowing Down

Let’s dispense with any romantic notions of air superiority as we once knew it. The future of warfare isn’t just F-35s carving up the sky or hypersonic missiles screaming toward hardened targets.

It’s also a $300 quadcopter flying 20 feet off the ground, dropping a grenade into the open hatch of a multi-million-dollar tank. It’s insurgents with Amazon Prime accounts fielding real-time ISR and kinetic effects with store-bought hardware.

This is the new normal—and it’s terrifyingly asymmetric.

The explosive rise in commercial drone tech has created what can only be described as a military cost-benefit nightmare. On one side of the equation: cheap, expendable UAVs that require minimal skill to operate.

On the other side: billion-dollar air defense systems sweating it out trying to track and shoot them down with munitions that cost more than the drone operator’s house.

It’s enough to give Pentagon accountants an aneurysm. Or at least, the dark realization that war is no longer cost-efficient.

The Ukrainian battlefield has been the clearest laboratory for this problem. FPV drones flown by 19-year-olds in hoodies are rewriting doctrine in real-time, turning trenches into death traps and making armor commanders question life choices.

But this isn’t just an Eastern Europe problem. It’s a global issue, from Yemen to Taiwan to Texas, as militaries scramble to adapt to the one threat their Cold War-era systems were never designed to handle: cheap, low, slow, and smart.

Legacy air defense systems were designed to intercept fast, high-flying threats—fighters, bombers, and ballistic missiles.

They weren’t built to detect or prioritize a DJI Phantom buzzing tree lines at 20 knots or a fixed-wing foam drone skimming rooftops. And don’t even start on drone swarms—those break the targeting paradigm entirely.

That’s where Loke comes in.

There’s a reason Saab didn’t build Loke to NATO’s gold-plated wiring standards: drones don’t wait for your ISO certifications.

As drone technology becomes more autonomous, harder to detect, and more accessible to state and non-state actors alike, countries can’t afford to sit on their hands waiting for perfection.

They need good enough, right now. Saab and the Swedish Air Force understood this. That’s why Loke matters. Not because it’s sexy but because it’s fast, it works, and it closes the kill chain on today’s most disruptive aerial threat. And if other militaries don’t get their act together, Sweden may soon find itself in the unusual position of exporting the future of air defense.

Blueprint for the Future: Bureaucracy Be Damned

The success of Loke wasn’t just technical, it was a culture shift. It showcased what happens when military leadership gives engineers a mission and gets out of the way.

The program was spearheaded by the Luftstridsskolan (Air Warfare School), Ledningsstridsskolan (Command & Control Warfare School), and the Flygstaben (Air Force Staff). Norrbotten Air Wing (F 21) operators were brought in early to give real-world feedback—something that should be obvious but rarely happens.

The plan is to field Loke in operational units by late 2025. That’s lightspeed in defense circles.

And Saab isn’t done. The system is scalable and upgradeable. Add more radars? Sure. Plug in electronic warfare modules? No problem. Mount bigger guns or non-kinetic effectors? Absolutely. It’s a C-UAS sandbox for modern militaries, and Sweden just built the first castle.

Loke isn’t pretty. It’s not even particularly elegant. But it doesn’t need to be. What Saab built in 84 days is a living, firing example of what defense innovation looks like when you kill the red tape and let engineers engineer.

In an age where militaries are scrambling to adapt to cheap drone warfare, Sweden just handed the rest of us a blueprint—written in bungee cords and tracked kill counts.

And that, my friends, is an innovation worth strapping to a pallet.

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